Year: 2011

I was watching an episode of Mythbusters the other day. I always enjoy that show and while most of the attention goes to the two main stars my favorite is Grant Imahara. On this particular episode they were trying to determine if a bullet could set off a rocket propelled grenade and if so what…

It may be a little early to post this but not much. At this point it would be a big surprise if some other post made it into this list. These fifteen posts were far and away the most read of 2011. The first on the list had over 20,000 views. The last on the…

Well I spent more time on the computer in general and blogging last week then I intended. I may have a problem. I managed to ignore a lot of email and didn’t do much of my usual work though so I got some break. This past weekend was spent with family and friends celebrating Christmas….

One of the great things in my job is the chance to make connections between people doing interesting things. Lately a lot has been happening in the world of educational uses for the Kinect Sensor utilizing the Kinect for Windows SDK. Johnny Kissko seems to be the center for a lot of this so I…

A recent blog post by Ian Bogost (The Virtues of Long Compiles) has me thinking once again about the trouble with fast compiles. How would you program differently if you could only compile your project once an hour or perhaps once a day? Actually its more complicated than that. What would you do between compiles?…

This is another of several recent “CSTA Blasts” that I am posting on my blog. If you are a member of the Computer Science Teachers Association you will have seen this and I apologize for the duplication. If you are a computer science educator, especially in K12, you should be a member. SIGCSE and the…

I was reading through a couple of blog posts by Garth Flint earlier today. I’ve been using some of my vacation time to catch up on blog reading and had put off reading some of Garth’s posts until I had time to do it right. Garth is one of those people who uses his blog…

This is one of several recent “CSTA Blasts” that I am posting on my blog. If you are a member of the Computer Science Teachers Association you will have seen this and I apologize for the duplication. If you are a computer science educator, especially in K12, you should be a member. The annual CSTA…

A number of universities around the US are piloting courses to fit the proposed Advanced Placement CS Principles course. At the University of Washington Bothell Professor Kelvin Sung had the idea to create an CS principles course for AP high school that introduce non-programmers to programming via game design. The video below shows off some…

I’m on vacation this week. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t collecting links last week and putting them together for this post. I’m not sure how much if at all I will be blogging between now and the end of the year. Yes, I should probably take time off from blogging as I am from…